Chapter 31
A few years ago I sat at the bedside of a friend’s grandmother. She was ninety-two years old and had been slipping in and out of consciousness for several days. Her body was failing in every measurable way. The monitors beeped and hummed. Her breathing had grown shallow. And yet—in one of those moments that stops the room—she opened her eyes, looked straight past everyone standing there, and whispered, “I see them. They’re so beautiful.” Then she smiled. And then she was gone.
What happened in that room? Was it just the final electrical firings of a dying brain? Or was something deeper going on—something the monitors could not measure? Was there a part of her that was already stepping across a threshold, seeing something that the rest of us could not?
I share that story because this chapter addresses one of the most important questions in all of theology, and it is a question that many Christians have stopped asking: What are we? Are we bodies that think? Or are we something more—souls housed in bodies, persons who can exist even when the body lies still on a hospital bed?
The answer to this question matters enormously. It matters for how we understand death. It matters for how we understand what happens between death and the resurrection. And—as I want to show you in this chapter—it matters for whether God’s pursuit of every lost soul actually makes sense.
Here is the core argument of this chapter in a single paragraph: The Bible consistently teaches that human beings are made up of both a material body and an immaterial soul. The soul survives the death of the body and exists consciously in the presence of God or in a state of waiting. This means that when a person dies, they do not cease to exist. They are still there—still a person, still conscious, still in God’s reach. And if the person never ceases to exist, and if God’s love never ceases to work, then the foundation is laid for God to bring every person to Himself. Substance dualism is the ontological ground—the philosophical bedrock—beneath the postmortem opportunity. Without it, the entire idea of God continuing to pursue a person after death collapses.
You and I already agree on this. We both believe in the conscious intermediate state. We both believe the soul survives death. But in this chapter, I want to do more than affirm what we already hold in common. I want to show you, from Scripture and from careful reasoning, just how strong the biblical case for substance dualism really is—and then I want to show you why it leads, almost inevitably, toward the hope of universal restoration.
Before we open our Bibles, we need to define our terms. Substance dualism is the view that a human being is composed of two distinct kinds of reality: a material body and an immaterial soul (or spirit).1 The body is physical—you can touch it, weigh it, see it under a microscope. The soul is not physical. You cannot put it on a scale. But it is real. It is the seat of consciousness, thought, personality, and our relationship with God. And—this is the crucial point—it can exist apart from the body.
Now, I need to say something right away, because the word “dualism” makes some people nervous. When I say substance dualism, I do not mean Platonic dualism. Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, taught that the body is a prison for the soul, that physical matter is inherently bad, and that the soul is inherently immortal—it can never die, no matter what.2 That is not what the Bible teaches, and it is not what I am arguing.
Biblical substance dualism says something quite different. It says the body is good. God made it. He called it very good (Gen. 1:31). The body matters so much that God promises to raise it from the dead and reunite it with the soul forever. Full human flourishing requires both body and soul together. The resurrection is the Bible’s emphatic declaration that our bodies are not disposable containers.3
At the same time, biblical substance dualism says the soul is real and can exist apart from the body during the time between death and resurrection. The soul is not inherently immortal in the Platonic sense. God created it. God sustains it. And Jesus Himself warned that God has the power to “destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). The soul’s continued existence depends entirely on God’s will, not on some indestructible quality built into the soul itself.4
So when I defend substance dualism, I am defending a view that honors both the body and the soul. The body is not a prison. The soul is not inherently indestructible. But the soul is real, it is conscious, and it survives the death of the body. That’s the view I believe Scripture teaches.
The opposing view is called physicalism (sometimes also called materialism). Physicalism says that human beings are entirely physical. There is no separate, immaterial soul. When the body dies, the person ceases to exist until God recreates them at the resurrection.5 We will return to the problems with physicalism later in this chapter. For now, let me simply say that it is not a trivial academic debate. As we will see, which view you hold has massive implications for whether the postmortem opportunity—and by extension, universal restoration—even makes sense.
Some people assume that the Old Testament teaches a purely physical view of human nature—that the ancient Hebrews had no concept of an immaterial soul. But that assumption does not survive a careful reading of the text. The Old Testament, written centuries before any significant Greek philosophical influence on Israelite thought, contains clear and striking evidence that the biblical writers understood the soul as something distinct from the body.6
When Rachel was dying in childbirth, the text says something remarkable: “And as her soul was departing (for she was dying), she called his name Ben-oni” (Gen. 35:18, ESV). Read that carefully. The text does not say “as she was losing consciousness.” It does not say “as her body was shutting down.” It says her soul—the Hebrew word is nephesh—was departing. The language is spatial. Her soul was going somewhere. It was leaving the body.7
This is not metaphorical language for “she was dying.” The parenthetical “for she was dying” shows that the departure of the soul is the explanation for the dying, not a synonym for it. She was dying because her soul was departing. The soul is one thing. The body is another. And they can come apart.
Notice how early this appears in Scripture. We are in Genesis—the very first book of the Bible. Long before Israel had any contact with Greek philosophy, the biblical writer described death as the departure of the soul from the body. This is not a Greek import. This is indigenous to biblical revelation from the very beginning.8
In 1 Kings 17, Elijah is staying with a widow in Zarephath when her son gets sick and dies. Elijah takes the boy’s body, stretches himself over it, and prays: “O LORD my God, let this child’s soul come into him again” (1 Kings 17:21). And then the text says: “And the LORD listened to the voice of Elijah. And the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived” (v. 22).
Think about what this passage assumes. The boy’s body is lying there dead. But his soul is somewhere else. It has left the body. Elijah does not pray for the body to be repaired. He prays for the soul to come back into the body. And when it does, the boy revives.9
This passage is one of the clearest Old Testament texts on the distinction between body and soul. The body can be present without the soul, and it is dead. The soul can be absent from the body, and it is alive somewhere else. When they are reunited, the person lives again. That is substance dualism in narrative form, embedded in the historical books of the Old Testament, written long before Plato was born.10
At the end of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher describes what happens at death: “And the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Eccl. 12:7). Here we have a crystal-clear picture of what happens when a person dies. The body goes one direction—back to the dust of the ground, just as God said in Genesis 3:19. And the spirit goes another direction—back to God who gave it.11
This is not ambiguous. The Preacher describes two components of the human person going in two different directions at the moment of death. If physicalism were true—if humans were entirely physical with no separate spirit—there would be nothing to “return to God.” The dust returns to the ground, and that would be the end of the story. But the Preacher says otherwise. There is something that goes to God. The spirit. The immaterial part of the person.
John Cooper, in his landmark study Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, argues that this verse is a summary statement about the biblical view of death: the body and the spirit are separated, and each goes to its proper destination.12 This fits perfectly with the substance dualist understanding. Death is not annihilation. Death is separation. The body goes to the ground. The spirit goes to God. And the person—the real person, the conscious self—continues to exist in God’s presence.
One of the most unusual passages in the entire Old Testament is the account of Saul visiting the medium at Endor and the appearance of the prophet Samuel after his death. Whatever we make of the details—and interpreters have debated them for centuries—the text presents Samuel as a conscious person who speaks, remembers, and delivers a prophetic message to Saul, all after he has died and been buried.13
The medium sees “a god coming up out of the earth” (1 Sam. 28:13), and Saul recognizes Samuel from the description. Samuel then speaks to Saul with full awareness of his situation: “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” (v. 15). He remembers God’s previous judgments on Saul. He delivers a new prophecy about what will happen the very next day. He is conscious, rational, and in possession of his memory and identity.14
Whether God permitted this encounter or whether it happened through other means, the text clearly assumes that Samuel continued to exist as a conscious person after the death of his body. His body was in the grave at Ramah. His soul was somewhere else. And it could be addressed, could speak, and could deliver the word of the Lord. That is not what you would expect if physicalism were true.
If the Old Testament lays the foundation for substance dualism, the New Testament builds a towering structure upon it. Again and again, Jesus and the apostles describe the human person as having both a body and a soul, and they consistently describe death as the separation of the two—not as the end of the person.
This is, in many ways, the single most important verse for our discussion. Jesus says: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28).
Stop and think about what Jesus is saying here. He draws an explicit distinction between the body and the soul. He says there are people who can kill the body. But those same people cannot kill the soul. The soul survives the death of the body. It keeps existing even after the body has been destroyed. If the soul were just another name for the body, or if the soul could not exist without the body, then Jesus’s words would be nonsensical. You cannot say “they can kill the body but not the soul” unless the soul is something distinct from the body that can continue to exist without it.15
Notice also the second half of the verse. Jesus says to fear God, who can destroy both soul and body in hell. The word “can” here is important. Jesus does not say God will destroy the soul. He says God can. God has the ability. This confirms that the soul is not inherently immortal in the Platonic sense—God could destroy it if He chose to. But the very fact that Jesus frames it as a capacity rather than a certainty leaves open the question of whether God will ever exercise that capacity. And as we have argued throughout this book, a God whose essential nature is love (1 John 4:8) and whose purpose in judgment is always restorative would never exercise that ability, because His goal is not destruction but redemption.16
The author of The Triumph of Mercy makes a fascinating observation about this verse. He points out that in Matthew 10:39, just a few verses later, Jesus uses the same Greek words—apollymi and psychē—but the translators render them differently: “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it.” In verse 28, the translators say “destroy the soul.” In verse 39, they say “lose his life.” Same Greek words. Different English translations. This obscures the connection Jesus is making. The “destruction” of the soul in verse 28 is not annihilation. It is the subjugation of the soul-life, the losing of one’s self-centered existence so that one may find true life in God.17
On the cross, Jesus turned to the repentant thief and said: “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). Today. Not “at the resurrection.” Not “someday.” Today. Both Jesus and the thief were about to die physically. Their bodies would be taken down from the crosses. But Jesus promised that today—that very day—the thief would be with Him in paradise.18
How is that possible if there is no soul that survives the death of the body? If physicalism is true, then both Jesus and the thief simply ceased to exist when they died. There would be no “today” in paradise, because there would be no one there to experience it. The promise only makes sense if something about both of them—their conscious selves, their souls—continued to exist after their bodies died.19
This is not a minor point. This is Jesus Christ Himself, in His final hours, making a promise that only works if substance dualism is true. He could have said, “You will be raised at the last day.” He could have said, “Sleep now, and wake in the resurrection.” He didn’t. He said today. Paradise. Conscious fellowship. Before the sun set on that Friday.
Moments later, Jesus cried out: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” (Luke 23:46). Again, notice the language. Jesus does not say, “I commit my body to the grave.” He commits His spirit into the Father’s hands. His body was about to hang limp on the cross. But His spirit—His immaterial self—was going somewhere. Into the hands of the Father.20
This echoes Ecclesiastes 12:7 almost exactly. The body goes to the dust; the spirit returns to God. Jesus Himself modeled substance dualism in His own death. If even the incarnate Son of God entrusted His spirit to the Father at the moment of physical death, then the distinction between body and spirit is not an abstract philosophical idea—it is woven into the most sacred moment in all of history.
Paul gives us some of the most detailed New Testament teaching on the relationship between body and soul. In 2 Corinthians 5, he writes: “For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (v. 1). Paul compares the body to a tent—a temporary structure that can be taken down. But even if the tent is destroyed, something remains. The person still has a “building from God.”21
He continues: “For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling” (v. 2). And then the crucial verse: “We are always of good courage, and we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord . . . and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (vv. 6, 8).
Paul describes two states. In state one, you are “at home in the body” and “away from the Lord” (in the sense of not being in His immediate visible presence). In state two, you are “away from the body” and “at home with the Lord.” Paul prefers state two. He would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.22
This only makes sense if the person can exist apart from the body. Paul does not describe death as a gap—a period of nonexistence between death and resurrection. He describes it as a transition from one kind of home to another. You leave the tent of the body and go to be “at home with the Lord.” That is conscious, personal existence without a physical body. That is substance dualism, taught plainly by the apostle Paul.
As the author of The Triumph of Mercy observes, Paul also wrote to the Corinthians about an experience of being “caught up to the third heaven”—and he was not sure whether he was “in the body or out of the body” (2 Cor. 12:2). The very fact that Paul considered it possible to have conscious experience outside the body demonstrates that he believed consciousness was not dependent on the body. You cannot be uncertain about whether you were in the body unless you believe it is possible to exist out of it.23
Paul makes a similar point in his letter to the Philippians: “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Phil. 1:23). Paul describes death as a “departure.” He is not dreading annihilation. He is not anticipating unconsciousness. He is looking forward to being with Christ, which he says is “far better” than his current life.
The language of departure is spatial, just as it was in Genesis 35:18 with Rachel. The soul departs. It goes from one place to another. And the destination is conscious fellowship with Christ.24
Peter uses the same kind of language. He speaks of “living in the tent of this body” and of putting it aside, as someone would remove a garment: “I know that the putting off of my body will be soon” (2 Pet. 1:13–14). Living in the tent. Putting aside the body. These are expressions that only make sense if your essential self exists independently of the body. You can only “put aside” something if you are still there after you do it.25
In the apostle John’s vision, he sees something startling: “I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. They cried out with a loud voice, ‘O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?’” (Rev. 6:9–10).
These are people who have been killed. Their bodies are dead. And yet their souls—the word is psychas—are alive, conscious, and speaking. They remember their earthly lives. They know about events happening on earth. They cry out to God. They are given white robes and told to rest a little longer.26
This is not the picture of people who have ceased to exist. This is the picture of conscious souls who have survived the death of their bodies and are actively engaged with God in the intermediate state. They have emotions (urgency, a desire for justice). They have speech. They have identity. Their bodies are in the grave, but they are with God. This is exactly what substance dualism predicts.
When we step back and look at the full range of biblical evidence, the picture is remarkably consistent. From the very first book of the Bible to the very last, the Scriptures describe human beings as having both a body and a soul—and they describe death as the separation of the two, not as the end of the person.
In the Old Testament, Rachel’s soul departs her body (Gen. 35:18). The boy’s soul returns to his body at Elijah’s prayer (1 Kings 17:21–22). The spirit returns to God at death (Eccl. 12:7). Samuel appears conscious and speaking after his death (1 Sam. 28:11–19).
In the New Testament, Jesus says the soul survives the body’s destruction (Matt. 10:28). Jesus promises paradise today (Luke 23:43). Jesus commits His spirit to the Father at the moment of physical death (Luke 23:46). Paul describes being away from the body and at home with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:8). Paul desires to depart and be with Christ (Phil. 1:23). The souls of the martyrs are conscious and speaking under the altar in heaven (Rev. 6:9–11).
This is not one or two isolated proof texts. This is a consistent, pervasive witness across both Testaments, spanning more than a thousand years of biblical writing. The Bible teaches substance dualism not as a Greek philosophical import, but as a natural and repeated feature of its own worldview.28
J. P. Moreland puts the point well in his study The Soul: the biblical writers consistently describe death as the soul departing the body, and they consistently describe the intermediate state as a period of conscious existence for the soul apart from the body. This is not an incidental detail. It is woven into the fabric of the biblical narrative at every level.29
And J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae, in their comprehensive study Body and Soul, argue that the cumulative biblical evidence for substance dualism is so strong that the burden of proof falls heavily on those who would deny it. Any view that makes the soul merely a function of the body has to explain away passage after passage in which the biblical writers clearly describe the soul as something that exists, departs, returns, speaks, and acts independently of the body.30
Now we come to the heart of this chapter. Why does any of this matter for the case we have been building throughout this book?
You and I agree that God offers a genuine opportunity for salvation after death. We have explored this in detail in earlier chapters. We believe that those who never had an adequate chance to respond to the gospel in this life will receive that chance after death. We believe this because the God who “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4) would not condemn someone who never had a fair opportunity to hear and respond.31
But here is the question: How is the postmortem opportunity even possible if there is no soul?
Think about it. If physicalism is true—if human beings are entirely physical, with no separate soul—then what happens at death? The body dies. The brain stops firing. Consciousness ends. The person simply ceases to exist. They are gone. There is nothing left. No soul. No spirit. No conscious self. Just a corpse returning to dust.32
On the physicalist view, the person does not exist again until God recreates them at the resurrection. Between death and resurrection, there is no one there. No person to encounter God. No consciousness to respond to the gospel. No soul for God to pursue. Just… nothing.
Now, a physicalist might respond by saying, “The postmortem opportunity could happen at the resurrection. God recreates the person and then offers them the gospel.” And yes, that is logically possible. But consider what that would mean. Between death and resurrection—which could be thousands of years—God is not pursuing that person. He cannot pursue them, because they do not exist. There is no relationship between God and a person who does not exist. There is no gradual work of conviction, no patient pursuit, no loving encounter. There is just a gap—a blank, empty gap—and then a sudden recreation and a one-time offer.33
That picture does not fit the God we see in Scripture. The God of the Bible is the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to search for the one lost sheep (Luke 15:4). The woman who lights a lamp and sweeps the house until she finds the lost coin (Luke 15:8). The father who watches the road every day, waiting for his prodigal son to come home (Luke 15:20). This God does not take a break from pursuing His lost children. He does not lose track of them in a gap of nonexistence. He pursues relentlessly.34
Substance dualism makes this relentless pursuit coherent. If the soul survives the death of the body, then the person is still there. God is still in relationship with them. His love is still at work. His Spirit is still reaching out. The intermediate state is not a gap in God’s pursuit—it is a continuation of it. And if God’s pursuit continues, then the postmortem opportunity is not a one-time offer sprung on a newly recreated person. It is the climax of a long, patient, loving encounter that has been going on since the moment of death.35
As the Beilby volume on postmortem opportunity discusses, the relationship between theological anthropology and the postmortem opportunity is deeply significant. The question of whether persons are essentially embodied or can exist as immaterial souls affects not only when the postmortem opportunity might occur, but whether it makes theological sense at all. Dualists who believe the soul is the essential self and retains its basic powers even without the body have a much easier time explaining how a genuine encounter with God could occur after physical death and before resurrection.36
Thomas Aquinas, working from a hylomorphic view of human nature (a view closely related to physicalism), argued that the soul cannot change its fundamental preferences without the body. If that were true, then repentance after death would be impossible, because the soul cannot function properly apart from the body. But as Jerry Walls has pointed out, this argument carries very little weight with substance dualists, who believe the soul retains its capacities for thought, choice, and relationship even apart from the body.37 Substance dualism does not just allow the postmortem opportunity—it gives it a framework that makes theological and philosophical sense.
Here is where the argument takes its final, and I think most compelling, turn. We have established that the Bible teaches substance dualism. We have established that substance dualism provides the ontological foundation for the postmortem opportunity. Now I want to show you that once these two truths are in place, the logic of universal restoration follows with remarkable force.
The argument can be stated simply:
God’s love never fails (1 Cor. 13:8).
The person never ceases to exist (because the soul survives death).
Therefore, there is never a point at which God’s love is working on nothing—there is always a person for God to love, to pursue, and to restore.38
Think of it this way. If God’s love is relentless, and if the person never ceases to exist, then on what basis would we believe that God’s love will ever stop working? What could make God give up? If the person is still there—still conscious, still a bearer of the imago Dei, still within God’s reach—then why would we think God would ever stop pursuing them?
Thomas Talbott makes this point powerfully in The Inescapable Love of God. He argues that a supremely loving God who has both the intention and the power to bring every human being to a glorious end will never abandon that pursuit. The “Hound of Heaven” will close off every alternative to union with God until each person, having wearied of their own selfishness and rebellion, finally embraces the destiny that is theirs.39 But this argument only works if the person continues to exist for God to pursue. Substance dualism ensures that they do.
David Bentley Hart, in That All Shall Be Saved, presses the point from a different angle. He argues that rational nature, by its very constitution, is an intentional movement toward an end. The restlessness of the rational will is directly convertible with the very existence of the rational creature. Given the dynamism of human nature, given its primordial longing for the Good, given the inherent emptiness of evil, no rational soul could freely persist forever in its rejection of God.40 For Hart, the soul’s continued existence is not just a necessary condition for restoration—it is part of the reason restoration is inevitable. As long as the soul exists, it longs for God, even when it does not know that it longs for God. And God, who is the source and end of every soul, will not rest until that longing finds its fulfillment.
Origen made a similar argument in the early centuries of the church. He insisted that no soul can ever perish ontologically—that is, the substance of the soul can never be destroyed—because God created it and what God creates is good. Souls can be morally dead, corrupted by sin and rebellion, but they can never be reduced to nothing. And because the soul endures, redemption is always possible. As Ilaria Ramelli summarizes Origen’s view, “the destruction of the sinner at the Judgment will be the destruction of his sin, that he may be a sinner no more, but a just man.”41 The fire destroys the evil, not the person. The person emerges purified.
This is a deeply important insight. If the soul is real and enduring, then God’s purifying fire always has something to work on. The imago Dei—the image of God in every person—is never fully destroyed, however defaced it may become by sin. There is always something worth saving. There is always a person beneath the rebellion, beneath the addiction, beneath the hatred. And God’s fire burns away everything that is not of Him, until what remains is the person He always intended them to be.42
Consider Psalm 139:7–8: “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!”
The psalmist declares that there is nowhere in all of reality where God is absent. Not even Sheol—the realm of the dead—is beyond God’s reach. If the soul goes to Sheol after death, God is already there. His presence pervades even the world of the dead.43
R. Zachary Manis, in his remarkable study Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, develops this idea in a profound direction. He argues that God’s presence “comes in degrees”—that God can be more or less present to created beings, even though He is always omnipresent in the sense that His power and knowledge extend everywhere. The mercy of Sheol and Hades, on this view, is that they postpone the full encounter with the divine presence that constitutes final judgment. But there is some degree of divine presence even in Hades, because God is never fully absent from anything He has made.44
This means that even in the intermediate state, the soul is not alone. God is there. His love is there. His Spirit is there. And if His love is there, then His love is at work. Not forcing. Not coercing. But wooing, drawing, illuminating, healing. Because that is what love does. It does not sit idle in the presence of the one it loves.
There is one more dimension of this argument that I want to highlight, because it is both philosophically significant and pastorally powerful. Hart makes the point that personhood is not a condition possible for an isolated substance. We are who we are because of our relationships—with God, with family, with the whole web of human connections that make us who we are. Our personhood is constituted by our loves and associations.45
If that is true—and I believe it is deeply true—then the salvation of any one person is connected to the salvation of every person they love. Think about it. Can a mother be fully redeemed if her child is lost forever? Can a father be truly “all in all” with God while his daughter is outside the gates? Talbott argues that this is logically impossible. If you truly love someone, you cannot be fully blessed while they are damned. Your own salvation is bound up with theirs.46
This argument depends on substance dualism. If the souls of the dead continue to exist in relationship with God and in some sense in relationship with each other, then the interconnected web of human personhood does not end at death. It continues. And God, who loves every person in that web, will not leave the web incomplete. He will restore every thread.
I have been making the positive case for substance dualism. Now I want to briefly explain why the alternative—physicalism—creates serious problems, especially for anyone who believes in the postmortem opportunity.
Physicalism, remember, is the view that human beings are entirely physical. There is no separate soul. Consciousness, thought, emotion, personality—all of it is produced by the brain. When the brain dies, the person ceases to exist. The only way they can exist again is if God recreates them at the resurrection.47
Some Christians hold a sophisticated version of this called “nonreductive physicalism,” which says that while humans are entirely physical, the mind or consciousness is an “emergent property” of the brain that cannot be reduced to mere brain chemistry. It is physical, but it is more than the sum of its parts. Yet even on this view, when the brain stops, consciousness stops. There is no survival of death without God’s act of recreation.48
Here is the problem. If physicalism is true, then between death and resurrection, there is no person. God cannot encounter a nonexistent person. God cannot speak the gospel to a nonexistent person. God cannot pursue a nonexistent person with His love. The entire period between death and resurrection becomes a theological dead zone—literally—in which nothing happens because there is no one for anything to happen to.49
This creates an additional problem that few physicalists have addressed. If God recreates the person at the resurrection, is the recreated person truly the same person who died, or a brand-new person with the same memories? This is known as the problem of personal identity, and it is a genuine philosophical puzzle for physicalism. If the original person was entirely physical and has been completely destroyed, then what God creates at the resurrection is, strictly speaking, a copy—a new entity with the same characteristics. But it is not the same person in the deepest sense.50
Substance dualism avoids this problem entirely. If the soul survives the death of the body, then the same person who died is the same person who is raised. The soul provides the continuity of personal identity across the gap of death. The resurrection is not the creation of a new person—it is the reuniting of the soul with a glorified body. The identity of the person is preserved because the soul, the essential self, was never destroyed.51
For all these reasons, physicalism is a poor fit for the theology that you and I share. If we believe in the postmortem opportunity—and we do—then we need a view of human nature that makes that opportunity coherent. Substance dualism does. Physicalism does not.
I want to bring together everything we have discussed so far by painting a picture of what substance dualism means for God’s saving work.
Imagine a man who lived his entire life without ever hearing the name of Jesus. He was born in a remote village, raised in a different religious tradition, lived a complicated life of mixed goodness and selfishness—like most of us—and died without ever having a real opportunity to respond to the gospel. On the conditional immortality view (before I came to embrace the hope of universal restoration), I would have said that God would give this man a genuine chance to hear and respond to the gospel after death. And I still believe that. We agree on that.
But substance dualism tells us how that encounter happens. The man dies. His body returns to the dust. But his soul—his conscious, personal self—continues to exist. He does not cease to be. He does not drift into nonexistence for centuries until God gets around to the resurrection. He is there, conscious, aware, and now in a state where God’s presence can be experienced in ways that were not available in his earthly life.52
And here is where universal restoration enters the picture. If this man is conscious and God is present, then God’s love is at work. The same love that left the ninety-nine to find the one. The same love that lights a lamp and sweeps the house. The same love that runs down the road to embrace the returning prodigal. That love is now directed at this man with an intensity and a clarity that his earthly life never afforded.
What reason do we have to believe that God’s love will fail? Is the man’s resistance stronger than the love of the God who made him? Is his stubbornness deeper than the patience of the God who died for him? Paul says love “never fails” (1 Cor. 13:8). Paul says nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus—not death, not life, not angels, not rulers, not things present, not things to come, not height, not depth, nor anything else in all creation (Rom. 8:38–39). If death itself cannot separate us from God’s love, and if the person continues to exist after death, then God’s love continues to pursue that person without interruption.53
And if God’s love continues to pursue without interruption, and if the soul never ceases to exist, then on what basis would we conclude that God’s love will ever give up? The conditional immortality position says that at some point—perhaps at the final judgment—God stops pursuing and destroys the unrepentant. The universalist says: Why? Why would a God of relentless, never-failing love ever stop? If the person still exists, and God still loves them, and God is more powerful than sin, and God’s love is more persistent than rebellion, then the logical conclusion is not that God will eventually destroy the holdouts. The logical conclusion is that God’s love will eventually prevail for every single person.54
Now that we have built the positive case, I want to address some of the most common objections to substance dualism and to the connections I have been drawing between dualism and universal restoration.
Someone might respond by saying, “You are reading Greek philosophy into the Bible. The biblical view of the person is holistic. The Hebrews did not divide people into body and soul the way the Greeks did.”
This objection is very common in academic circles, and I understand its appeal. It is true that the Bible emphasizes the unity of the person. The Bible does not treat the body as a prison or the soul as an alien trapped in hostile matter. The biblical vision is of an integrated person—body and soul together, living in God’s world.55
But—and this is crucial—affirming the unity of the person does not require denying the duality of the person. The Bible teaches both. The resurrection of the body demonstrates that the body matters. The conscious intermediate state demonstrates that the soul is real. Both are true. Substance dualism does not deny that the full human person is body-and-soul-together. It simply insists that the soul can exist apart from the body during the period between death and resurrection, even though that is not the ideal or final state.56
Cooper has shown convincingly that the Old Testament writers, while they certainly emphasized the unity of the person, also clearly described the soul as something that could depart from the body, return to the body, and exist in the presence of God after death. The holistic emphasis and the dualistic evidence are not contradictory. They are two aspects of a richer, more nuanced view of human nature than either “pure holism” or “pure dualism” would suggest.57
The mistake is treating “holistic” and “dualistic” as if they are mutually exclusive. They are not. A married couple is a holistic unity—but the husband and wife are still distinct persons who can exist apart. In the same way, the human person is a holistic unity of body and soul—but the body and soul are distinct realities that can be temporarily separated at death.
Someone might go further and say, “The whole concept of the soul surviving death is borrowed from Greek philosophy. It is not native to the Bible. The early Hebrews did not believe in it, and the New Testament writers were influenced by Hellenistic culture.”
But this objection does not hold up under scrutiny. As we saw earlier, the Old Testament evidence for substance dualism appears in some of the earliest texts—Genesis 35:18, 1 Kings 17:21–22, Ecclesiastes 12:7. These texts were written centuries before Greek philosophical influence became significant in Israelite thought. The concept of the soul departing the body at death is indigenous to biblical revelation. It is not a Greek import.58
Furthermore, the kind of dualism we find in the Bible is quite different from what we find in Plato. Plato taught that the material world is inherently inferior, that the body is the soul’s prison, and that the soul is naturally immortal. The Bible teaches none of these things. The body is good. The body will be raised. The soul depends on God for its continued existence. Biblical substance dualism and Platonic dualism share the conviction that the soul is real and distinct from the body, but they differ on almost everything else.59
To accuse biblical dualism of being “Greek” is like saying that because the Greeks believed the sun exists, any mention of the sun in the Bible must be a Greek import. Just because the Greeks held some beliefs about the soul does not mean that the Bible’s teaching about the soul was borrowed from them. Two traditions can arrive at similar conclusions independently, especially when both are observing the same reality.
Someone might respond by saying, “Okay, I accept substance dualism. The soul survives death. But that does not mean God will save everyone. The soul’s survival just means the person continues to exist—it does not mean God will eventually bring them to repentance.”
This is a fair point, and I want to be clear: substance dualism alone does not prove universal restoration. The argument for universal restoration requires multiple pieces, and this chapter provides only one of them. But it is a crucial one.60
Substance dualism provides the necessary condition for universal restoration: the person must continue to exist for God to save them. Without substance dualism, the postmortem opportunity makes no sense, and the universalist argument loses its foundation. With substance dualism, the argument becomes: the person never ceases to exist, God’s love never ceases to work, God is more powerful than sin, and a truly free person confronted with the full reality of God will eventually choose Him. Each of these premises has been defended in other chapters of this book. Substance dualism is the one that guarantees there is always a person there for the other premises to apply to.
Think of it as the ground beneath a building. The ground alone is not the building. But without the ground, the building cannot stand. Substance dualism is the ground. The biblical, theological, and philosophical arguments for universal restoration are the building. And they stand because the ground holds firm.
Someone might point out that the Beilby volume on postmortem opportunity explicitly says the theory is compatible with physicalism as well as with dualism. And that is technically true. A physicalist can argue that the postmortem opportunity happens at the moment of resurrection, when God recreates the person.62
But I would argue that the physicalist version of the postmortem opportunity is theologically and philosophically weaker than the dualist version in several important ways. First, it requires a gap of nonexistence between death and resurrection, during which God is not in active relationship with the person. Second, it raises the problem of personal identity—is the recreated person truly the same person? Third, it fits poorly with the biblical language of conscious existence after death, which we have surveyed extensively in this chapter. And fourth, it makes God’s pursuit of the lost episodic rather than continuous. God pursues the person during their earthly life, stops pursuing them when they die (because there is no one to pursue), and then starts again when He recreates them. That is a very different picture from the relentless, never-stopping pursuit we see in Luke 15 and in the character of God revealed throughout Scripture.63
Substance dualism gives us a much more coherent picture. God pursues the person in this life, continues to pursue them after death through the conscious intermediate state, and brings that pursuit to its climax at the final judgment. There are no gaps. No interruptions. No periods of nonexistence. Just the continuous, patient, relentless love of a God who never gives up on anyone He has made.
Someone might raise the topic of near-death experiences (NDEs) and argue that they do not provide reliable evidence for the soul’s existence. The author of The Triumph of Mercy recounts his own experience of leaving his body during a severe illness, including being told to remember the number “361” before returning to his body, and then seeing that number appear on a medical monitor. He openly acknowledges the strangeness of the experience while cautioning against letting subjective experiences override Scripture.64
I think this is wise counsel. I am not resting the case for substance dualism on near-death experiences. The case rests on Scripture, as we have seen. But I would note that the growing body of research on NDEs—especially veridical NDEs, where people report accurate observations of events they could not have observed from their physical location—is at least consistent with substance dualism and very difficult to explain on physicalist grounds.65 They are not the foundation of the argument, but they may be a confirming sign pointing in the same direction as the biblical evidence.
As we come to the end of this chapter, I want you to see the full picture of what substance dualism means for the case we have been building in this book.
We are not just bodies. We are body and soul. And because we are body and soul, death is not the end of us. Our bodies will rest in the grave until the resurrection. But our souls will be conscious, alive, and in the presence of God.
For believers, that means immediate, joyful fellowship with Christ—today in paradise, absent from the body, present with the Lord. For those who have not yet come to faith, it means entering a state where God’s presence can be experienced in new and powerful ways—where the excuses are stripped away, the illusions are shattered, and the God who is love meets the person face to face.
And because the person never ceases to exist, God’s love never runs out of someone to love. His pursuit is not interrupted by death. His patience is not cut short by the grave. The intermediate state is not a gap in God’s saving work—it is a theater of God’s saving work. And the final judgment is not the moment when God gives up on the stragglers—it is the moment when every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord, not by coercion but by the overwhelming beauty and love of the God who has been pursuing them since before they were born.66
Origen understood this. Gregory of Nyssa understood this. The earliest Christian theologians who read Paul and John in the original Greek understood that if the soul endures and God is love, then the conclusion is not annihilation but restoration.67 Origen argued that no soul can perish ontologically—what God creates is good, and its substance can never be destroyed. Souls can die morally, but they will rise again, because their substance never vanishes. And because their substance endures, God’s redeeming love always has a foothold, always has something to work with, always has a person to save.68
Hart captures the vision beautifully when he writes that for God, who is the transcendent end that draws every rational will into being, the soul is never beyond reach. God never ceases setting every soul free, again and again, until it finds its home. And in the end, if God is God and spirit is spirit, evil must disappear in every intellect and will, and hell must be no more. Only then will God be all in all.69
That is the vision this chapter has been building toward. Substance dualism is not just an academic question about what we are made of. It is the foundation of the hope that God’s love will have the last word for every person He has ever made. Because we are body and soul, we endure beyond death. Because we endure beyond death, God’s love continues to work on us. And because God’s love continues to work on us, the day will come when every lost sheep is found, every lost coin is recovered, every prodigal comes home, and God is finally, truly, all in all.
The gates of the New Jerusalem are never shut (Rev. 21:25). And the souls He is pursuing never cease to exist. That is why I believe every last one of them will walk through those gates.
↑ 1. For a rigorous philosophical defense of substance dualism, see J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae, Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), chaps. 1–4. For a more accessible treatment, see J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters (Chicago: Moody, 2014), chaps. 1–3.
↑ 2. Plato’s view of the soul’s inherent immortality is most fully developed in his Phaedo. His negative view of the body as a prison for the soul appears in Phaedo 62b and Cratylus 400c. For an accessible comparison of Platonic dualism and biblical substance dualism, see John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), chaps. 1–2.
↑ 3. The bodily resurrection is central to the Christian hope (1 Cor. 15:12–58). Paul insists that the body will be raised, transformed, and glorified. This sets biblical substance dualism apart from Platonic dualism, which saw the soul’s escape from the body as the ultimate goal. See Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 8.
↑ 4. This is an important distinction. Platonic dualism held that the soul is inherently immortal—it cannot be destroyed under any circumstances. Biblical substance dualism holds that the soul’s existence depends on God’s sustaining will. Jesus’s warning in Matthew 10:28 confirms that God could destroy the soul if He chose to. The universalist affirms that God, in His love, will never make that choice because His purpose is always restoration, not destruction.
↑ 5. For a representative defense of Christian physicalism, see Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For a critical evaluation, see Moreland and Rae, Body and Soul, chaps. 5–7.
↑ 6. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chaps. 3–5. Cooper argues at length that the Old Testament evidence for substance dualism is indigenous to Israelite thought and does not depend on Greek philosophical influence.
↑ 7. The Hebrew nephesh has a range of meanings depending on context, including “life,” “self,” “soul,” and even “appetite.” In Genesis 35:18, the context of departure at death makes “soul” the most natural translation, as the nephesh is described as leaving the body. See Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 3.
↑ 8. Moreland and Rae, Body and Soul, chap. 1. They note that the patriarchal narratives in Genesis predate any documented contact between Israel and Greek philosophical tradition.
↑ 9. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 4. Cooper regards 1 Kings 17:21–22 as one of the clearest Old Testament texts on the body-soul distinction.
↑ 10. Plato lived approximately 428–348 BC. The events of 1 Kings 17 are set in the ninth century BC, and the text likely reached its written form well before the period of significant Hellenistic influence on Jewish thought (generally dated to the third century BC and later).
↑ 11. The Hebrew word for “spirit” here is ruach, which can mean “breath,” “wind,” or “spirit.” In this context, the parallelism with the dust returning to the earth strongly suggests an immaterial component of the person that departs at death and returns to its source in God. See Moreland, The Soul, chap. 4.
↑ 12. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5, “Death and the Afterlife in the Old Testament.”
↑ 13. The interpretation of 1 Samuel 28 is debated. Some hold that God genuinely permitted Samuel to appear; others that it was a demonic impersonation; still others that it was a vision produced by God. For a defense of the view that the text presents a genuine appearance of the deceased Samuel, see Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 4.
↑ 14. Regardless of one’s interpretation of the mechanism, the narrative clearly assumes that Samuel’s conscious existence continued after his death. The text presents him as fully aware, rational, and in possession of prophetic knowledge.
↑ 15. Moreland and Rae, Body and Soul, chap. 2. They argue that Matthew 10:28 is the most straightforward New Testament affirmation of substance dualism and that attempts to explain it away on physicalist grounds are forced and unpersuasive.
↑ 16. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 7, “God, Freedom, and Human Destiny.” Talbott argues that a God whose nature is love would never exercise the power to destroy, because destruction would be the ultimate failure of love’s purpose.
↑ 17. The Triumph of Mercy: The Reconciliation of All through Jesus Christ, the section on Matthew 10:28–39 and the meaning of apollymi. The author argues that the translators obscure Jesus’s point by translating the same Greek words differently in verses 28 and 39.
↑ 18. Some interpreters argue that “today” modifies “I say to you” rather than “you will be with me in paradise”—yielding “I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise.” But this is grammatically strained and is motivated primarily by theological commitments to soul sleep rather than by natural reading of the Greek. See Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 7.
↑ 19. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 383–384. Manis notes that the biblical language of paradise and the intermediate state assumes a conscious, personal existence after death that is most naturally explained by substance dualism.
↑ 20. Jesus here echoes Psalm 31:5: “Into your hand I commit my spirit.” The language assumes that the spirit is a distinct reality that can be entrusted to God’s care at the moment when the body dies.
↑ 21. The tent metaphor is significant. A tent is a temporary, portable dwelling. The person who lives in the tent is not identical with the tent. When the tent is taken down, the person still exists. Paul uses this metaphor to describe the relationship between the person and the body. See Moreland, The Soul, chap. 5.
↑ 22. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 7. Cooper argues that 2 Corinthians 5:1–8 is perhaps the most detailed Pauline text on the intermediate state and that it clearly teaches conscious existence apart from the body.
↑ 23. The Triumph of Mercy, the section on Paul and conscious existence apart from the body. The author cites 2 Corinthians 12:2, Philippians 1:21–24, and 2 Peter 1:13–15 as evidence that the New Testament writers believed in conscious existence independent of the body.
↑ 24. Moreland and Rae, Body and Soul, chap. 2. They note that Paul’s language of “departing” to be with Christ presupposes that the person can exist in Christ’s presence without a physical body.
↑ 25. The Triumph of Mercy, the section on Peter and the tent metaphor. The author observes that Peter’s language of “living in” and “putting aside” the body only makes sense if one’s essential being exists independently of the body.
↑ 26. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 8, “The Intermediate State in the Apocalypse.”
↑ 27. Moreland, The Soul, chap. 6. Moreland argues that even if Revelation 6:9–11 contains symbolic elements, the symbolism presupposes the reality of conscious souls existing apart from bodies.
↑ 28. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chaps. 3–8. Cooper’s work remains the most comprehensive biblical-theological defense of substance dualism and the conscious intermediate state.
↑ 29. Moreland, The Soul, chap. 4, “The Biblical Evidence for the Soul.”
↑ 30. Moreland and Rae, Body and Soul, chap. 2, “The Biblical Case for Substance Dualism.”
↑ 31. See our discussion in Chapter 27 for the full biblical and theological case for the postmortem opportunity. See also James K. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation after Death (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021), chaps. 2–5.
↑ 32. Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?, chap. 3. Murphy acknowledges that on the physicalist view, personal continuity through death requires a special act of divine recreation.
↑ 33. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, pp. 52–54. Beilby discusses the relationship between theological anthropology and the postmortem opportunity, noting that the theory is compatible with both dualism and physicalism but that the dualist version is more naturally coherent.
↑ 34. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 13, “Love’s Final Victory.” Talbott argues that God’s pursuit of the lost is relentless and will ultimately succeed for every person.
↑ 35. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, chap. 1, on the theological coherence of universal restoration and the continuity of God’s saving work beyond death.
↑ 36. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, pp. 236–237. Beilby discusses Jerry Walls’s critique of Aquinas on this point.
↑ 37. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, p. 236. Walls argues that Aquinas’s hylomorphic view leads him to the implausible conclusion that the soul cannot change after death, a conclusion that dualists rightly reject.
↑ 38. This simple syllogism draws together the argument of this chapter with the argument of Chapter 30 on the nature of divine love and freedom. The combination of God’s unfailing love and the soul’s enduring existence creates the conditions for universal restoration.
↑ 39. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 13, “Love’s Final Victory.” The “Hound of Heaven” image comes from Francis Thompson’s famous poem, which Talbott applies to the universalist vision of God’s relentless pursuit.
↑ 40. Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Fourth Meditation, “What Is Freedom? A Reflection on the Rational Will.” Hart draws on Gregory of Nyssa’s argument that the dynamism of rational nature makes eternal persistence in evil impossible.
↑ 41. Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, A Larger Hope?, Volume 1: Universal Salvation from Christian Beginnings to Julian of Norwich (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019), the section on Origen’s metaphysics of the soul. Ramelli summarizes Origen’s argument from Commentary on Matthew 5:10:2 that the otherworldly fire destroys sin, not sinners.
↑ 42. See our discussion in Chapter 4 on God’s purifying fire and Chapter 8 on fire as purification. The image of God in every person is defaced by sin but never fully destroyed—and God’s fire burns away what is false to reveal what is true.
↑ 43. Psalm 139:7–8 is also discussed in Chapter 27 in the context of the biblical case for the postmortem opportunity. Here we focus on its implications for the soul’s continuous existence within God’s reach.
↑ 44. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 299–300, 383–384. Manis develops the concept of degrees of divine presence and argues that Sheol/Hades represents a state of partial divine presence that postpones the full encounter constitutive of final judgment.
↑ 45. Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Third Meditation, “What Is a Person? A Reflection on the Divine Image.” Hart argues that personhood is constituted by relationships and that no person can be fully saved in isolation from the whole web of human connections.
↑ 46. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 7. Talbott’s famous argument about loving his own daughter and the logical impossibility of being reconciled to God while those we love are lost. See also Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave: Is Salvation Possible in the Afterlife?, the section summarizing Talbott’s argument about the interconnectedness of love and salvation.
↑ 47. For a representative statement of Christian physicalism and the problems it faces regarding personal identity through death, see Kevin Corcoran, Rethinking Human Nature: A Christian Materialist Alternative to the Soul (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006).
↑ 48. Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?, chap. 4. Murphy acknowledges the difficulty of explaining personal continuity through death on physicalist grounds and appeals to God’s faithfulness as the guarantee of identity.
↑ 49. This is one of the strongest theological objections to physicalism. If there is no person between death and resurrection, then God’s relationship with that person is interrupted by a total gap in the person’s existence. This sits uncomfortably with the biblical picture of God as the one from whose love nothing can separate us (Rom. 8:38–39).
↑ 50. This is sometimes called the “replica objection” to physicalist accounts of resurrection. See Moreland and Rae, Body and Soul, chap. 6, for a detailed discussion of the personal identity problem facing physicalism.
↑ 51. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 9. Cooper argues that substance dualism provides a straightforward account of personal identity through death: the soul is the bearer of continuity.
↑ 52. See our discussion in Chapter 27 on the nature of the postmortem encounter and in Chapter 28 on the mechanism of universal restoration through that encounter.
↑ 53. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 13, “Love’s Final Victory.” Talbott cites Romans 8:38–39 as decisive evidence that God’s love is inescapable—even death cannot separate us from it.
↑ 54. This is the core universalist argument from the nature of God’s love, developed at length in Chapter 30 and grounded here in the ontological reality of the soul’s survival.
↑ 55. For the “holistic” reading of biblical anthropology, see Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008). For a critique of Green’s position, see Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chaps. 1–2 of the revised edition.
↑ 56. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 9. Cooper calls this “holistic dualism”—a view that affirms both the unity of the person and the real distinction between body and soul.
↑ 57. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chaps. 3–5. Cooper’s careful exegetical work demonstrates that the Old Testament writers held a form of substance dualism long before any contact with Greek philosophy.
↑ 58. Moreland and Rae, Body and Soul, chap. 1. See also Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 3, on the pre-Hellenistic date of the key Old Testament texts.
↑ 59. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chaps. 1–2. Cooper carefully distinguishes biblical substance dualism from Platonic dualism on the goodness of the body, the resurrection, and the soul’s dependence on God.
↑ 60. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, chap. 1. Parry notes that the case for universal restoration is cumulative—no single argument is decisive on its own, but the combined weight of biblical, theological, and philosophical evidence is compelling.
↑ 61. See our discussion in Chapter 3 on the nature of God as love (1 John 4:8) and in Chapter 4 on the restorative purpose of divine judgment. Substance dualism provides the ontological ground; God’s character determines the eschatological outcome.
↑ 62. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, pp. 52–54. Beilby affirms that the theory of postmortem opportunity is compatible with either dualist or physicalist anthropology.
↑ 63. The point here is not that physicalists are wrong to affirm the postmortem opportunity, but that substance dualism provides a more theologically satisfying framework for it. On the dualist view, God’s pursuit is continuous; on the physicalist view, it is interrupted by a gap of nonexistence.
↑ 64. The Triumph of Mercy, the section on out-of-body experiences. The author recounts his experience during severe illness, including being given the number “361” as a sign, and cautions against using subjective experiences to override Scripture.
↑ 65. For a scholarly treatment of veridical near-death experiences and their implications for substance dualism, see J. P. Moreland, The Soul, chap. 7, and Janice Miner Holden, Bruce Greyson, and Debbie James, eds., The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009).
↑ 66. Philippians 2:10–11 promises that every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. As we argued in Chapter 19, this confession is best understood as genuine and salvific, not coerced. Substance dualism ensures that the person making this confession is the same person who lived and died—their identity preserved through the continuity of the soul.
↑ 67. See our discussion in Chapter 26 on the patristic witness to universal restoration. The earliest Greek-speaking theologians—Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and others—read the New Testament in its original language and concluded that it teaches the eventual restoration of all things.
↑ 68. Ramelli, A Larger Hope?, vol. 1, the section on Origen and the soul. Ramelli summarizes Origen’s rejection of Philo’s annihilationism and his insistence that no soul can perish ontologically (substantialiter), because what God created is good and its substance cannot be destroyed.
↑ 69. Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Fourth Meditation. Hart draws on Sergei Bulgakov’s image of heaven and hell existing within every rational nature and argues that God, as the transcendent end of every rational will, never ceases setting every soul free until it finds its home.